XML News from Thursday, October 16, 2008

The Mozilla Project has posted the first beta of Firefox 3.1 for Mac, Linux, and Windows. Version 3.1 is built on Gecko 1.9.1, improves Web standards support, adds a Text API to the Canvas Element, supports border images and JavaScript query selectors, and claims to improve the URL bar (though they've been missing a lot of low-hanging fruit there for years, so I'm skeptical.) This beta adds:

• Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
• More CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties
• A new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to
• Improved control over the Smart Location Bar using special characters to restrict your search
• Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms and offline applications.

Windows 2000 or later and Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later or Linux are required. Windows 98 and earlier and Mac OS X 10.2 and earlier are no longer supported. Final release is not expected until next year.